Colouring outside the lines. Slipping beyond the boundaries. Leaving schedules shivering in the morning chill as the plane takes off for sunnier places. Forgetting the routine that wraps up the day during the rest of the year. That's the theory anyway. But as soon as we arrived in Spain, I realised boundaries were up for discussion at every turn. We needed ...
I read an anecdote on Twitter recently about a little boy who asked a face-painter for a butterfly. His mother wouldn't let him have a butterfly - she wanted something more "boyish". The child really wanted the butterfly, but the dad got involved too, and there was no way they were allowing it. It's a sad ...
What’s your ideal holiday? If you had asked me ten years ago, the answer was easy. Reading good books, getting some sun, sleeping in, eating out. Basically relaxing. I didn’t need to go to the warmest beach or the hottest club – my needs were simple. Or so I thought. Until I first tried holidaying ...
"What would you like for your birthday dinner?" I asked my husband, my mind veering between pizza or steak. "What about that sausage lasagne you used to make - we haven't had it in ages," he said. There's a reason we haven't had it in ages - it takes me a bit of time to make it and ...
From the first pain of the first contraction, parenting is interlaced with self-sacrifice and doing all sorts of things you'd never do if you didn't have kids. For me, going to a theme park or fairground (or The Merries as we called them when I was a child) ticks that box, and self-sacrifice is exactly ...
55 hours. That was the figure that went around and around in my head when I went back to work after having my first baby. Between commuting and time in crèche, she was out of the house every day for 11 hours, or 55 hours a week. In practice, everything was fine – we had ...
I went to U2's last ever Irish concert, in Slane in 2001. It was the best concert I was ever at, made all the more special knowing it was their last one ever. Oh, except for the one I saw in Croke Park some time in the middle of the noughties, before we had kids. ...
Have you ever been the last one to read the book everyone's raving about - The Girl on the Train or Gone Girl maybe? Going to Cambrils Park in Northern Spain was a bit like that for me - at least a dozen people had told me how fantastic it is, and I arrived worrying that ...
Until my mid-twenties, I thought hayfever was something limited to children, limited to summer, and limited to people who sat around in fields of hay, rubbing sheaves of dry grass in their eyes. That last one is a slight exaggeration, but really I didn’t think of it as debilitating, and I didn’t think it would ...
When I go on holidays, and I do what lots of people do – I put photos up on Facebook. It’s the modern version of the postcard isn’t it – “Having a lovely time, wish you were here!” So here’s the Facebook version of one holiday, as told through the photos I posted on social media: There was ...